Help! My avatar has been happily up for a few weeks now. Today I got a PM that it was "unsuitable".

The avatar utility reported the following problems with your image:

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The image type was unexpected or unknown. The only valid image types are GIF, JPEG, and PNG.
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Due to these problems, we have removed your avatar. The URL was: "http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y83/Mr_Chubbykins/McKayLeaderAv2.jpg"

I know this is really late, but I figured I would post it anyway in case any new folks were wandering around and wondering if offers for avatar hosting were still valid. I have some extra web space/bandwith that isn't used each month so I'm willing to host avatars. Just drop me an e-mail at tozturktrek at politicsphilly.com with your info.

I made an avatar from a 100 x 100 detail of my own LCARS system interface, since I wanted something unique. I converted it to 256-color .bmp then saved .gif and .png copies. I uploaded those two to ImageZs.com and tried to register the .gif version with TrekBBS. That wasn't accepted. I tried .png, and that wasn't accepted. In both cases, I got a message "Improper picture type."

Ever since my 100th post, I have been trying to get my avatar here, but unfortunately, it is still too big. I can show the image here, if someone please resize and/or make it so it fits this bbs' paramters I will be very greatful. Here is the image:

Posted by CaptainSerek:
Ever since my 100th post, I have been trying to get my avatar here, but unfortunately, it is still too big. I can show the image here, if someone please resize and/or make it so it fits this bbs' paramters I will be very greatful. Here is the image:

We're hoping some of the long time members of the board could offer some insight. Obviously, we have our avatar up. We're using photobucket's free account which gives you 1500mb of bandwidth a month. We also have set up an Imageshack account which allows 100 mb of transfer per hour for each picture. Our avatar is 100x100 pixels and 10.4kb.

We don't know exactly how BBS hotlinking works as far as what constitutes a hit to our avatar link and how much bandwidth BBS avatars generally use. We're looking for guidance as to which site, photobucket's free account or Imageshack's, is better suited for BBS avatars as far as bandwidth offered and also which site is more reliable.

^I would think that avatars on this board work like images on all the websites out there, i.e. they are cached into your memory, hence after the first download of the image, the photo probably won't use up any of your bandwith (for that user of the site), so once a user has downloaded your avatar for the first time, it is unlikely they will need to download it again unless you change it or the file gets cleared from their web cache.

according to the stats you gave us, Imageshack will give you about 70Gb of bandwith per month for your photo, versus the 1.5Gb given by photobucket, so I'd say imageshack was the better host, as it will allow your avatar to be downloaded a LOT more.

there are about 6500 registered users on the site (plus maybe 500 anonymous ones at any one time), and if ALL of them were to download a 11Kb file at the same time (that's 7000 users), you'd need 77Mb of bandwith.

to summarise, Imageshack gives you more bandwith over the month than photobucket, and although it has hourly limits, a LOT more people would have to download the image to put your av offline.

Thank you both for the helpful info. It was truly appreciated. The poll thread was also very helpful. Ended up using the imageshack link for the avatar because the bandwidth resets every hour. Will probably use the photobucket for posting other pictures and photomanips. Thanks again for the help.

Hypermart - Only a free 30 day trial.
Netfirms - Pay site. (10$ a month)
Virtual Avenue - Pay site (7$ a month)
100grams - doesn't exist anymore.
Imagestation - doesn't allow .gif files, so no animated avs.
Digikitten - I don't know, really. I've seen a lot of problems on this board from them, so I haven't looked.
Villagephotos - free one is ok, but you can only upload something like 25-30 images. Which sucked for me because I'm moving my whole webspace....
Speedis.org - gone.
Microtech - Don't know.
Photobucket - A lot of people here use this. I've seen problems with it as well, but I guess it's good to go.
Onlinerock - OK, but it's really for musicians. No biggy though...
Imageshack - Seems OK